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2013 Contemporary American Authors Lecture Series

National Book Award winning poet Terrance Hayes will be the twenty-fifth guest in Marygrove’s Contemporary American Authors Series. He will deliver the Lillian and Don Bauder Lecture at 8:00 p.m. on Friday, April 19, 2013.

Along with the National Book Award, Hayes has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation, the Kate Tufts Discovery Award, and a Pushcart Prize, among other recognitions.

His credentials and body of work are remarkable. Hayes’s most recent collection, Lighthead (2010) earned him the National Book Award for Poetry. Wind in a Box (2006) examines the questions of race through a variety of voices and styles. Hip Logic (2002) won the National Poetry Series Open Competition. The poems of Muscular Music (1999) interweave the ideas of music and cultural identities. Hayes has also contributed to several anthologies, magazines, and journals, including TheNew Yorker, Ploughshares, and African American Review. Hayes has also been the recipient of the Red Brick Review Award, Whiting Writers Award (1999); and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship (2010). According to the National Book Foundation, “His poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant.”

Born in Columbia, South Carolina, Hayes received his B.A. in visual arts from Coker College (1994) and his M.F.A. in creative writing from the University of Pittsburgh (1997). Known as both a poet and a painter, Hayes explores what it means to be a black male artist through a variety of cultural, historical, and personal discourses. Hayes has taught at Xavier University of New Orleans and is now Professor of English at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh where he currently resides.